By happy circumstance I found myself at a Soulful CEO circle this week. Six of us sitting in the shade of a mature Cherry Blossom tree in the summer sun, taking time out to contemplate the topic for the session, which was around using our intuition to grow/start our business.

The conversation centred on those intuitive nudges, or flashes of inspiration, we get and – often in instant response – the voice of the inner critic that comes up with all the reasons why that is a bad idea.

It was a good reminder of the tug of war that often happens in my inner world. The inner critic is very convincing as it’s all about safety. However, its voice was born very early on in my life when safety was linked (as it is for all humans) to approval from my primary caregivers. The messages were then reinforced over and over in various settings in childhood, like school and competitive sports, where the desire for approval was very much linked to the innate instinct for belonging and safety.

There was never really a point in my life where someone said “trust your inner voice”, it was more the opposite. Even as an adult it is the same memo that society often plays back, the messaging around the current pandemic could be no clearer a case in point. The overarching theme – certainly here in New Zealand- is “do not trust yourself, trust your government instead, this is the one source of truth”.

I am in wonder that more people are not incredulous at the wildly differing advice, approaches and mandates globally, from these one sources of truth. The only one source of truth that exists, I believe, exists inside each of us.

And yet I suspect the biggest pandemic on planet Earth today is self abandonment.

This is sometimes referred to as the mind versus heart, or ego versus intuition, and how to know which voice is speaking?

Serendipitously, as I’m reading Glennon Doyle’s book Untamed: Stop Pleasing, Start Living at the moment, she has been talking about this very issue. She recounts a conversation she had with a friend about a pivotal decision in her life. Her friend had suggested that she get really present in her body and out of her head.

When she had become more present in her body – which for me is most easily achieved by intentionally focusing on breathing in/out my tummy and becoming aware of how my body is feeling – her friend asked her to relook at her choices one by one, each time asking “Does that feel warm to me?”

At this point her decision felt obvious, as one choice felt cold, icy actually, like she might die of cold. The other felt warm, soft and spacious. Her friend said “Your body will tell you things your mind will talk you out of. Your body is telling you what direction life is in. Try trusting it. Turn away from what feels cold and toward what feels warm”.

Glennon goes on to say that these days, in business meetings, she is not looking for justifications, judgements or opinions, she is looking for knowing. She listens for statements like “I did the research and sat with these options for a while, this one feels warm to me”.

I was talking to a friend about growing his business. Since starting the company, he had taken on a couple of employees, both more by chance rather than through a specific job search. I love this organic approach, but I also think its potency truly comes into its own when setting some intentionality around it.

If he can take some time to imagine a future team of people who collectively represent the same values that he himself projects from his inner world, who can collectively deliver his vision, he can start to wonder just how that might come about and listen out for the intuitive nudges that will undoubtedly pop into his head.

Envisioning the biggest contribution I can make in life, spending time just wondering how that could look, then actively asking, “I wonder how this will come about” primes me neurologically to receive all sorts of interesting insights and impulses into how my dreams can be achieved. The trick is to follow the ones that feel right, without letting my inner critic sabotage each idea before it even takes flight.

Right now I have the impulse to update my online presence and profile in terms of what I have to offer in the business arena. My current presence doesn’t convey the level of skills and experience I have working on businesses as well as in them very succinctly.

With all the years I had in senior management, working at the strategic end of business, I haven’t even listed three of the four businesses I have helped set up and run; far less joined a lot of dots that give me quite a comprehensive toolkit as a business coach/consultant. I need to create outwardly the shifts that have occurred within me.

As I said in Do You Want to Make a Heartfelt Change to Your Career? between my own personal growth that needed to happen, and the collective dysfunction that I’d seen over and over in organisations getting in the way of meaningful and lasting change, I hadn’t expected I’d even want to return to that world so I hadn’t really focused too much on it.

Of course my inner critic has been hard as work with every impulse I’ve had, “who are you to offer these services?”, “are you good enough?”, “do you have enough skills and experience?” and lots of comparison with many others out there. In the session under the cherry tree this week, I listened to most of the others voice the same concerns about growing their own ventures while simultaneously thinking, felling and saying to them “Of course you can do it, go for it”.

I recognise these voices for what they are, momentary doubt from my inner critic just trying to keep me safe. But it’s all good, I am safe. It’s actually mainly with excited anticipation I think about stepping back into the arena. I have an authentic edge now that makes all the difference to me in the type of work I’ll engage in, assisting and guiding people in running a business by helping them clarify the vision of their business and how it fits with their personal goals. 

As I listened to some of the others air their inner critic at the Soulful CEO circle, I thought of Glennon’s advice and realised that, when I lean into this, it feels warm, smoking hot, like I’ve got this. I can hear and I trust my inner knowing.

What about you, have you had any impulses or intuitive nudges regarding your career or business? What has your soul been whispering and what has your inner critic had to say about it? Maybe it’s time to thank our inner critic for trying to keep us safe but, smiling, say “I’ve got this” and go step forward into your new future.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Why the Integration of Feelings and Logic Will Save the Human Race, How to Quieten the Inner Critic, When to Act on Possibility, Embracing the Feminine within All of Us, , What You Give Your Attention to Is Your Greatest Contribution, Connect to Your Well-Being  and Could a Broader Perspective Benefit Us All Right Now? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

This week I’ve been contemplating taking on work outside home for the first time in almost seven years.

When I left my corporate career I knew I’d never return to work in the way I had done until then, yet I knew I’d gained a lot of skills and experience that I would no doubt put to good use at some future point.

As I often recount, at that juncture in my life I simply felt my outer and inner world were not a match, I had a gnawing frustration I was not all me, yet I had no idea who or what that looked like.

When my children came along I had become more determined to live the way I wanted them to, so when I left corporate life to spend more time with them, it was also with a steely determination to tune in and figure out who I really am, what I really like and what I really want out of life.

Jungian analyst and author Dr James Hollis believes asking “What does my soul want of me?” to be one of the most important questions to ask ourselves if we want to live a fulfilled life. He says “This is especially imperative for people journeying into the second half of their lives”, something he’s explored in writing for almost thirty years.

I haven’t quite been writing that long, but I have written continuously over the last seven years. In fact this is the three hundred and sixty first week of publishing my life lessons as I come home to more of me and learn to nurture my true nature.

It’s been a big journey, one where I’ve looked into a lot of dark corners, faced a lot of fears, brought to light and merged together parts of myself that were in conflict. All the while the question on my mind has been “What comes next?  What wants to find expression through me?”

I had been thinking perhaps I’d move away from the business world altogether and work more one-on-one with individuals. The field of Customer Experience represents the output of an organisation. The issues, frustrations and customer complaints reflect the amount of collective dysfunction within an organisation, which in itself is fuelled by the dysfunction within individuals, particularly in leadership teams.

Patrick Lencioni sums this up well in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (a Leadership Fable) where he spells out the five most common dysfunctions as absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability and inattention to results.

Now that I am more trauma informed, I deeply understand how much of this directly maps back to how the human psyche is shaped by early childhood experiences in each individual, unknowingly influencing the way people show up – and often limit themselves – as adults.

I was no exception with my perfectionist and people pleasing tendencies, I worked long and hard to do and be it all for everyone. There was one particularly competitive, controlling and manipulative colleague who really contributed to me eventually learning a valuable lesson, summed up well by an unattributed post I saw this week:

“You absolutely have to become okay with not being liked. No matter how loving or kind you are, you will never people please your way into collective acceptances. You could be a whole ray of sunshine and people will hate you because they are used to rain.”

I say eventually as it took many more years in a similarly intensive personal relationship to fully awaken to the level of trauma within my psyche and body. Being good was a childhood lesson my nervous system had learned well, and – as such – I carried extremely high levels of anxiety into adult relationships and interactions. That is something I have had to consciously learn to recognise in the moment and apply learned skills around having and holding healthy boundaries in order to move away from defensive states of being.

In my corporate career I worked closely with people at all levels of business. From executives at a strategic level, to those at the coal face delivering the product or service, it became very obvious to me that true success comes from people being, well, authentic. That sums up in a nutshell what Patrick Lencioni was pointing to.

Left unchallenged, the school bullies are still bullies, the nerds are still nerds, the rebels are still rebels and the compliant kids just become compliant adults. From the water cooler to the board room it could often be like a school playground. There are those who strut around acting entitled and superior and those who are repressed, with everything in between. All human dysfunctions come to the fore.

Because I worked to transform the customer experience through people and cultures, I could clearly see what did not work. For example, I learned that job descriptions and key performance targets – even giving them lots of training and development or new systems or processes – doesn’t change their inner landscape.

So between my own personal growth that needed to happen, and the collective dysfunction that I’d seen over and over in organisations getting in the way of meaningful and lasting change, I hadn’t expected I’d want to return to that world.

In terms of living a fulfilled life, to Dr James Hollis’ point, what my soul had been yearning for was me to step into my full potential. I can’t say I’m all the way there yet, that feels like a lifelong journey, but I certainly feel like I’ve a stepped into a much healthier, more evolved version of myself. I know for sure that any future work I do with people and organisations must be based around one thing – authenticity – both from me and them.

Talking to a business owner this week, who has several things they need help with, brought my lens into sharp focus. As I listened to the issues and tasks at hand, I started to mentally take on what they might look and feel like, some felt great, and others not so great.

“Boundaries” I thought on a personal note, “this is hugely helpful in gaining clarity around the stuff I’m great at and enjoy, the real value-adding stuff that is a win-win, versus the kinds of things I’m might be proficient at but I really do not enjoy”.

I started to think in terms of my skills and experience across three categories:

• What I’m great at and enjoy
• What I’m proficient at but do not enjoy
• What I’m just not good at

I know whatever I do has to be about the first category; it’s where I can really make a difference.

But there is a lot in that middle category after decades of perfectionism and people pleasing, and I can get distracted and tripped up by taking on things just because I am capable of doing them, but then |I just end up demotivated and unhappy, and it shows.

Then I remembered that a few years ago I went through my Linked In profile and purged dozens of skills endorsements I had for skills I really did not want to use again professionally, like contract management. Anything structured like that gives me a headache just thinking about it.

I also similarly took out bullet points of achievements that I had no desire to recreate. That was hard to do because they were hard won, but made no sense to keep unless I wanted to invite more struggles.
But I did keep all the ones that make my heart sing; those that centre around understanding people and their potential, writing, speaking, personal development, leadership development, communications, strategic planning, coaching and mentoring to name a few.

In my thought process this brought me to a dilemma, how to succinctly convey this breadth and depth of skillset and experience with just the right flavour of me. The me who no longer gets driven by wiring that wants to please and perfect to the exclusion of my soul, but the me who is learning to dance to my soul’s rhythm.

When I have done contracting or consulting work in the past I’ve just used my name, as I have on my website. But I got invited to a Soulful CEO circle a while back, and I immediately thought “Oh that name is amazing”, I could see the benefit of having a name that gets directly to the heart of matters.

The bringing together of what is often seen as a juxtaposition – the sharp edge of business with the authentic resonance of the soul – is something that excites me. Having a real passion for authenticity, creating structures in society (whether a business or part of a larger system) that thrive on and enhance people being their full authentic expressions of themselves motivates me.

As for a business name, I like Authentic Edge, or something similar, but the right thing will fall into place at the right time. I’m just blown away by the possibilities of getting back into something I thought I’d never go near again, and it’s really all down to tuning into and defining more of who I am and learning the skills I need to honour that.

What about you? Does your career honour who you are on the inside? Does your role reflect the biggest version of your contribution you can imagine right now? In what ways could you shift focus to attract more of what would excite and empower you and deliver more of what you have to offer to the world at large?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy How Living Your Passions Fully Combats Feeling Lonely, Simplify Your Life to Be Accepted and Loved as Your Authentic Self, Want to Make the World a Better Place? Tune In, Ask No One to Be Different So That You Can Feel Good, What Do the People in Your Life Have to Teach (Good and Bad)? and How Do I Honour What I Believe and Care Less What You Think? To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

There is a Scots expression about making a “helluva caffudle” which translates as “a lot of confusion” that sprung to mind this week when dealing with the corporate office of the online grocery supplier I’d used for many years.

The conflicting replies I received were indeed confusing, on one hand sympathetic and responsive, on the other contradictory, uncaring and disingenuous, which pointed to a culture that isn’t exactly customer driven, the experience depending entirely on the individual who I happened to be interfacing with.

Not much different to most places right?

To be fair, it’s one of the key reasons I exited the corporate world. It gave me a bit of a litmus test of where the customer experience has evolved to (or not) since I last worked in that field. And I realised that, after all my study and experience of human potential, psychology and dysfunction, if I were to liken most organisations to a personality, it would be a narcissistic one.

To explain what I mean by this, I’ll quote from a few sources to explain what lies at the heart of most dysfunction among humans, and thus at the heart of most organisations of humans – lack of attunement.

Dr Dan Siegel says “Attunement is the process by which we form relationships”. When we attune with others we allow our own internal state to shift to come to resonate with the world of another.”

One of my all-time favourite articles happens to be on this topic, and the crux of the issue is summed up exquisitely by Teal Swan:

“Ask yourself the following questions...Do I feel like my parents understood me when I was little, or even tried to understand me? Did they see into me and feel into me and have empathy for me and adjust their behaviour accordingly or not? Did they acknowledge how I felt or did they invalidate it, telling me I shouldn’t feel that way? How did my parents treat me when I was cranky, frightened or upset?”

When our parents were not attuned to us, we went one of two ways to cope with the terror of the experience. We either learned that our survival depended on:

1. disconnecting from them and retreating into a narcissistic bubble, where all that was real and all that mattered was our individual experience (otherwise defined by Daniel Shaw in his book Traumatic Narcissism as “The child who externalises their experience, projecting onto others the shame, guilt, humiliation and fear they experienced and cannot tolerate themselves”). Or
2. being hyper attuned to the people in our lives so that we could perceive them, anticipate their behaviour and make adjustments to our behaviour accordingly in order to avoid harm (otherwise defined by Daniel Shaw as the child who internalises their experience and persecutes themselves).”

She goes on to explain that neither state is healthy. “It is not a fulfilling life to spend all your energy obsessively trying to keep yourself safe by attuning to other people at the expense of tuning out to yourself.

But the destruction on this planet owes itself to those people who have learned to cope by retreating into the egocentric bubble...You cannot attune to someone and say the wrong thing to them. You cannot attune to someone and stay in denial about his or her reality.”

So let me tell you the story about strawberry jam, and you can judge for yourself how much a lack of attunement contributed to my online grocery company losing around $25,000 per annum of our business...

I’d been having trouble with my online grocery shop for the last year and things seemed to be getting worse, with more and more items appearing to be in stock at the order stage and then not getting delivered because they were out of stock on a regular basis. This was resulting in regular trips to other stores to get what was needed, far from ideal.

While it is plausible that, between me ordering, and the store picking my order from the shelves, other customers may have come off the street and purchased those items each week, it seemed to me that it was happening with such regularity that something wasn’t right. Somehow, behind the scenes, the demand didn’t seem to be informing the supply.

Calls to Customer Service, and discussions with people at the store directly, resulted in no change. So I did what I’ve learned is most effective when I want to get to the bottom of root cause issues, and I contacted the Managing Director. This is usually an excellent entry point to find the person in the organisation who can investigate and help fix the cause of chronic issues.

All I really wanted to know was whether the company had some management, process or systems issues it could easily fix, or whether this was a good as it gets for now.

It was a disappointing start, having contacted the Acting-top-bod (whose day job is looking after the online offer, which I thought fortuitous at the time) but having had no acknowledgement after week, I had to follow this up. This, however, led to a phonecall from one of the online managers, who assured me this was not the level of service that I should be receiving.

She investigated and found some process issues and she also mentioned that the area’s online store should be the one offering the widest variety to customers, which makes absolute sense to me. She asked if I had any other issues aside of the ones I’d mentioned so I brought up the topic of the strawberry jam.

I buy a particular brand that has no refined sugars added and, about a year ago, the online store mysteriously stopped supplying the strawberry option. It still offered the raspberry, blueberry and apricot, but no strawberry.

However, the same company have another store a couple of kilometres away who offer a much wider variety but don’t do online deliveries (begging the question “why not?” apparently it’s something to do with loading bays, though it’s not entirely clear to me). However, what they do have is stock of the strawberry jam. So this told me – and the online manager - the company itself is obviously not having supply issues around this particular product.

So I allowed a number of weeks to pass to see whether the process issues would be sorted and I could rely more on stock levels. This was a bit hit and miss, but certainly there was no reappearance of the strawberry jam.

So I decided, last ditch attempt, to go to the newly appointed top-bod and see whether this could be resolved. This was delegated to another digital manager who replied:

“The size of the store means that unfortunately the full range is not available. Unfortunately the review of the spreads range won’t take place until March next year (i.e 10 months away), but we’ve made a note of your feedback... It’s always our intention to provide our customers with a great online shopping delivery experience – feedback like yours will ensure we can continue to improve this service.”

Then there was the matter of their other store, the bigger one with more variety, not being the online store. Aside of loading bays, the response cited “the location of the store is in relation to the suburb demand to keep our carbon footprint small.” While this might seem sensible, I should point out one store is 6.7 kilometres away, while the other is only 6.8 kilometres from our suburb.

I will confess this response tipped me over the edge, eliciting from me frustrated expressions like “Seriously?”, “Give me a break”, “Shame on you” and “Utter utter garbage, what a complete waste of my time”.

By this point, I’d come to the conclusion that this was the best I was going to get from my online shopping experience with this company. While in some ways it would be awesome to have a one-stop-shop for all our consumable needs, it is a bit like saying it would be awesome to have a partner who meets all my emotional needs. Neither is really realistic nor, actually, desirable since life would then likely lack variety, growth and expansion.

So I decided the best way forward was to register with another online grocery company and split our business between the two, thus insuring a wider variety of product availability. Despite the time consuming process of registering and filling that first virtual trolley, it was worth it to have options.

I will say that my spluttering response, while not actually eliciting a response from the Managing Director directly, did result in a response from their leadership team; the person who is in charge of the company’s public relations. Those of you not familiar with corporate set ups might not know that this is the person usually responsible for a company’s reputation via the media; it’s quite a different field from those who deal directly with customers.

For someone who has worked in both fields, I would have preferred and appreciated an authentic response from someone directly involved in the leadership of the day-to-day operations and customer supply chain.  I then received two crates of strawberry jam, some cereal and the promise of a discount voucher for my inconvenience. Despite the generosity and immediate follow up, I would have just preferred an explanation for the disparity in previous responses if I’m honest, and clarity on the real issues.

While I’m not wedded to the idea of a response directly from the person I’d written to, I would have expected an answer coming from, or being delegated by, a leader to be an honest reflection of the shortcomings. As I concluded on this question of character last week, people who own up to their faults and weaknesses are to be admired, and so it is with business.

I will never forget when I left the railway industry in the UK, one of the extremely frustrated customers I had spoken to many times over the years said “while I will probably never like the service (since it was prone to delays and failures on occasion due to infrastructure issues that were not quick fixes nor within the direct control of the company), your honesty has made it tolerable and I have felt that at least the issues were tabled and someone cared”.

It is my experience that behind the customer interface of most well established companies, quite aside of political agendas, is a veritable feast of legacy systems and spaghetti junctions of often cumbersome processes to manage, the archetypal swan on water. Knowing the limitations and being able to articulate them goes a long way.

There is no doubt that, on my wish list for online grocery shopping,  I’d want a reliable system to capture not only the customer demand failures of the stock the company does offer, but which products the company does not and customers’ buy elsewhere (i.e. opportunity). While that seems a long way off based on my recent experiences, it would certainly create more loyalty.

What I had come to realise though in the years I did work in the field of customer experience was, whether the customer is on the agenda (from a universal experiential perspective, rather than the individual hit-and-miss interactions) entirely comes down to whether its leader is attuned to the customer needs.

By leader I mean the person who actually determines a company’s culture, which is not always obvious. It can be the local Managing Director or Chief Executive, or a Group Executive or at Board level – and that not only changes from company to company, but at different points in time within companies as well. For example, I’ve found its pretty common for many local chiefs to be left alone so long as they are meeting Shareholder expectations. In times of economic or political turbulence the screws come on.

Having worked behind the scenes in a few large organisations, and had exposure to many more inside views of corporate structures, systems and processes through colleagues and consultants in the field of customer experience over the years, I came to the conclusion that organisational dysfunction will only resolve and evolve once people – in particular the leaders of organisations - start to do their own personal work to evolve beyond the dysfunctional patterns of behaviour learned in childhood.

And, so, it seems on the face of it, that this is where society remains still. That said, I have great hopes as we move forward with initiatives like the Inner MBA Programme (a Sounds True collaboration with LinkedIn, Wisdom 2.0 and Mindful NYU) leading the way.

And how do those of us who are not the true culture leaders of these organisations make a difference? How will we get organisations to meet our needs?  Get healthy. By recognising and rinsing out our dysfunctional ways of relating to others, attuning to ourselves and each other, developing healthy boundaries, and learning to communicate them and holding others accountable with grace, it is inevitable that organisations will start to attune more to those whose needs they serve.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy You See What Happens When Leaders Are Not Grown Up on the Inside, What Do You Want The Prevailing Global Culture to Look Like?, Stand in Your Own Truth and How to Be True to You When Life Pulls You in Different Directions. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

As 2020 draws to a close, I was reflecting on a piece of news an old colleague of mine had posted about a lovely surprise holiday her husband had booked to a tropical location at the end of next year. Probably like many people, I am unsure whether that kind of travel will be possible again by then, but I started to wonder whether that was even the right question to be asking myself.

In his article 15 Great Quotes on the Importance of Asking the Right Question Mitch Ditkoff states how, as a consultant, he continues to be astounded by how few organisations have any kind of process to press pause, reflect and make sure they are coming up with the right questions. 

Setting aside questions about COVID19 itself for now, I started to think back to those early lockdowns, when much of the world seemed to stand still. It was a time when we as a family got to pause, reflect and take stock.

I can understand people wanting to get back to holidays and social activities, but what did that pause shed light on? There were reports of Venice’s canals running clearer, the clearest they’ve been in sixty years. An article in Science Direct sadly concluded (after research looking at the effects on the environment during the first global lockdowns) “Coronavirus itself is Earth’s vaccine and we humans are the virus”.

Talk of holidays and “getting back to normal” evokes in me a sense of frustration. I’m going to ignore the expression “the new normal” for the moment, because that seems to be more associated with control and fear, and that is not the kind of future I’m envisaging. But this idea of life going back to the way it was before the global pandemic seems ridiculous to me.

It has amplified so many issues about our environment and our social, political, economic, technological and personal challenges that it is a time in history ripe for change.

But having witnessed the relatively quick return to a lack of human connection between commuters in London after terrorist attacks in the early part of the millennium, I know how quickly distraction sets in.

During the lockdown here back in March through May, I revelled in being able to stroll out my front door and walk peacefully through our neighbourhood. But as soon as the restrictions were lessened, road traffic increased and the peaceful walks became crowded with road noise and traffic fumes, so now I have to get in my car to drive elsewhere if I want to take a peaceful walk.

I loved that my car did not get its tank refilled for over two months, it weighs on me that I consume fossil fuels. Yet, like many people around the world, I have commitments that would be extremely difficult to meet without running a vehicle. How can I find ways to change this?

How many governments and major political parties right now are even thinking about the lessons this crisis has taught us and have evolution on their agenda?

That said, I know my most effective voting takes place through the money I spend and the things I give my attention to. So where am I placing my attention? What am I spending money on? Am I using my resources in a way that would encourage the kind of change and transformation that could be for the benefit of not just me or my family, but for all of humankind, the creatures and the living planet on which we all reside?

I learned this year that I have white privilege. What other privileges do I hold? How can I give other people the benefit of my privileges? How can I help dismantle the systems of oppression within myself and for others?

I also learned from The Social Dilemma documentary that social media is six times more effective at spreading false news. Since conspiracy theories have abounded in 2020, I’ve watched friends and family become polarized on important topics to a degree that neither side seems able to hear the other.

I’ve had to ask myself, am I using social media as a tool? Or am I letting it demand my attention and manipulate my thinking? And where is my own resistance to hearing others’ opinions?
 
I learned that, in a time when our country faced a health risk, our government cut off the supply to my chosen form of healthcare and made only pharmaceuticals available. What can I do to ensure I maintain a freedom of choice in my healthcare even in times of crisis?

I learned that I was absolutely spot-on in my self assessment that I am not cut out to home school my children. Yet being able to give them and their schoolwork such individual attention led me to asking the right questions that uncovered their neurodiversity, and still more questions to find the right support and training so they can flourish. I wonder how I can support all children in their uniqueness to flourish?

I learned the importance of self sustainability. With panic buying, a lack of groceries and no access to garden supplies, keeping emergency supplies and a variety of fresh things to eat growing in our garden became more important. It highlighted all the problems I had known about with mono-farming and the way we currently source goods and services from around the world. What more can I do with our budget to encourage local and organic businesses?

I learned that reconnecting with my partner and children was simultaneously challenging and liberating. It brought about a huge amount of personal change in terms of consciously shaking off old beliefs and behavioural patterns that weren’t serving us. Where to next on that I wondered?

And then I got one of Claire Zammit’s emails that asked seven power questions:

• Where in your life have you most felt like yourself this past year?
• What have been the greatest challenges you’ve overcome?
• What can you acknowledge about yourself and your strengths?
• What is it time to let go of in your life?
• What is it time for forgive yourself for?
• What is it time to forgive others for?
• What are the old patterns that it’s time to release?

It reminded me that, while I have learned a lot about myself this year, the road ahead lies wide open for me to keep learning.  

2020 is a year that I think of as catalysing. It has led me to ask more questions than it has produced in terms of answers. I’m always impatient for change, and I know as I look back change will probably seem quicker than it feels right now.

Am I asking the right questions I wonder? So long as I keep taking time to pause and reflect on the bigger picture of my own life, I’m confident the right questions will arise.

The question is, with holiday season almost upon us at the end of this landmark year, what are the right questions for you to ask yourself right now?

​If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Change the World One Day at a Time, Want to Make the World a Better Place? Tune In, What Value Are You Adding to the Currencies in Your Life?, How You Are Complicit in the Oppression of Others, You See What Happens When Leaders Are Not Grown Up on the Inside and The Internal Shift You Need to Help Solve the Social Dilemma. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

One of the most powerful things I’ve learned from years spent in corporate roles is the role of humility in problem solving. Sure, it’s true that most spend too little time in the definition of the problem also, but it is the lack of humility and involvement in the process that holds at bay some of the most obvious and effective solutions.

Many have an aversion to negative words, drummed in over years of personal development, and ‘problem’ sounds like one. When you have a boss, or a boss’s boss, that thinks you have a problem, it sends a red alert straight to your brain and, generally, throws the best of us into our flight and fight response. Not the optimal starting point.

Before you respond, relax. Seriously, do whatever it takes to relax first, it will open you up to new ideas. Remember, the problem is just pointing to a space to create a solution, likely to lead to something better. It’s not in anyone’s best interests for you to simply spew out a solution then and there; in fact it’s not in anyone’s best interests for you alone to even define the problem.

For those who have been on any self respecting management development, project or process improvement training, you will know the steps in a good problem solving process. It’s fairly simple: first you identify all the facts and assumptions, then you define the problem (making sure you’re defining the real problem and not just part of the problem or symptoms of the problem), from there you flip to the positive and define the objective, before generating alternative solutions, evaluating them, deciding which to go with implementing, followed lastly by evaluation and follow up.

Where we run into trouble is this, ego.  The secret to great solutions is humility. Why?
Think about it, most organizations are constructed as a hierarchy. In that hierarchy you are given certain powers. The further up the hierarchy the more humility is required, yet it is a rare quality witnessed. More often the status quo is that the decision makers are far removed from the problem but either worry that they should know the answer or think that they already do.

This is true from the perspective that they have a more strategic view. But that is only because those further down the chain don’t have the delegated authority to access the information and communications that would give them the strategic view.

For many years I spent my career climbing the corporate ladder, but when I hit the level of head of the function I was interested in, that was the limit of my ambition. While I am wired strategically and found it relatively easy to look at companywide issues from broader perspective, sitting endlessly in decision making forums discussing subjects of very little interest just didn’t float my boat.

When one of the team asked what it was that had motivated me to the level I was at, it made me realise it was control. Pure and simple, I wanted enough control to make a difference. As it turned out, that was based on the flawed premise that positions hold power.

Organisational construct is always evolving, although this idea of hierarchies has been around a long time in human history but it’s no longer serving us. Sure, everyone has a role to play, and not everyone can do everything, but allowing people the bandwidth to contribute and create around the thing they do well is where most companies are missing the boat.

Last year I wrote a few articles about this in more detail, questioning the need for managers in today’s world and pointing towards a more self managing construct that some companies have adopted, where profit, purpose and personal fulfillment can thrive together.
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At the crux of all of it lies humility, the recognition that others have skills, ways of looking at issues, ideas about solutions that we don’t have.

Even in the traditional hierarchy, rarely do companies train their managers, hone job descriptions and performance management matrix’s to be explicit about what each level of management needs to focus on and let go of, as you climb a hierarchy. Consequently many are doing the jobs of many of their teams, and too few are really focused strategically enough in their roles.

It is common to see a chain reaction from above based on an innocent comment from the chief executive or one of the directors. In essence, people all throughout the hierarchy scrambling to save someone higher up’s ego, someone who thinks they should have known the answer to that question straight off the bat.

Huge swathes of activity get focused on what was deemed urgent rather than important. Executives everywhere are often horrified if they get visibility of the useless activity spurred by an innoxious comment or question. In fact, the bigger the company, the more of this kind of activity is often seen.

At home each member of the team is a fully functioning, powerful, free individual. They look after their own finances, make investment decisions, run households, bring up children, deal with crisis, sickness and death, many are even leaders in their communities or in clubs, sports or other activities. In other words they are both free and whole.

Yet in the workplace, the job description, the hierarchy, treats individuals as far less than whole. It is a rare thing to see those involved in downstream delivery involved in upstream design; it is a rare thing for those closest to the problems to be involved in the definition or creation of a solution to the problem. It is a rare thing for all employees to be entrusted with all the information that is relevant to the allow them to perform to their highest potential in their role.

Instead, feeling a lack of power, our human instinct is to take it back. In organisations activity based on this instinct is rife, activity that serves only to undermine the vision and goals of the company, knowingly or not. Whether it’s unproductive conversations or out and out sabotage, much of the power in the organisation really lies there, because it can either support or diminish what those who hold the positional power are trying to achieve.

At our heart we are creators, let your people create. Great problem solving involves getting the biggest perspective you can on an issue; from that perspective you can get real clarity on what your real problem is. You will often not only be amazed at the real problem, but also the solutions that come forth in answer to it. Even better, given the wider involvement in the issue, the more commitment you have to its solution, and the process of change become seamless. Be humble and you will shine.

​This article was originally published on LinkedIn.

photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/17423713@N03/17426879444">Problem Solving</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/">(license)</a>

For most CEO’s, the notion of simply scrapping your entire management structure is a little uncomfortable to say the least. But let’s look at this more closely. Is your management structure adding value, or are managers actually the cogs in a cumbersome machine that is now past its best?

"people today want to be part of something meaningful"

People today want to be part of something meaningful, feel empowered and valued for their contribution. Organisations must move past trite vision statements and values, made trite only because those who ‘do the work’ are often not involved in their creation, so the organization doesn't 'live and breathe' the words written on its collateral. Rallying to a purpose means involvement, which leads to commitment.  

As discussed in my last article on why trust leads to better business outcomes, traditionally we apportion trust in organisations in the form of access to information, decision making power and financial authority. This strips many of the people ‘doing the work’ of any real power, we want those very people to take a more holistic view yet we don’t treat them as whole.

Better Brand and Bottom Line – Ditch Your Call Centre asserts that the role of a call centre is unnecessary, costly, and even harmful. But in Profit, Purpose and Personal Fulfillment Can Thrive Together - A Remarkable New Organisational Construct I discuss a wider - though similar - issue, learning from organisations who have transcended the issues faced by most by adopting more self managing constructs.
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So has the role of management become another middle man that is perpetuating unnecessary costs? Having been a manager for many years myself, it’s a question I’ve pondered more and more. Initially there was an ego attachment to it, a status that goes with having ‘power’, but then came the responsibility of having to achieve outcomes through others. Quickly I understood the value of intrinsic motivation and the ability to find and ignite it.

There is certainly an art to good management, but the question is whether it's necessary. Do managers simply have to learn these skills because of what has, in essence, been taken away from those in the value chain (doing the work that lies at the heart of the company's existence)? Take away control and many lose that intrinsic motivation to succeed on their own.

In an article, published in Forbes, Jacob Morgan talks of 5 must-have qualities of the modern manager.  He covers removing roadblocks from the paths of employees to help them succeed,  empowering and engaging people, having a handle of what consumers are saying online, which social and collaborative technologies are making their way into the enterprise, using those collaborative technologies to lead by example, being open and transparent, embracing vulnerability and sharing information and collective intelligence.

These are great qualities, but still, I wonder where the value-add is. How many of these things would be necessary in an environment where those who plan ahead and those who 'do' worked together in self managing teams, are these not things that can be achieved by anyone with the right access, savvy and relationships?

“there would be chaos”

Those who are managers may not have faith that all the people they currently manage could self manage well. Some may even think there would be chaos. Yes it could be a bumpy ride at first, but people quickly adapt and evolve given the right support.

There has to be a huge amount of effort put into training managers that move through the various levels of managers anyway, why not invest that elsewhere, cut out the middleman?

Most people manage perfectly well outside of work, in all the other areas of their life, without someone managing them. Those you manage are after all parents, homeowners, leaders in the community, sportspeople and so on. With experts like Frederic Laloux (author of Reinventing Organizations) and Yanik Silver (author of Evolved Enterprise) around, there is plenty of support to create organisations that manage themselves in quite a different way.

"firms that follow these principles have outperformed the S&P 500 by 1000%"

The organisations of the future are those who rally to a real cause (both those who work in the organisation and their customers), encourage the whole person to show up (rather than the narrow professional slice that has become the norm) and have constructs that facilitate collaboration (internally and externally). In the book Firms of Endearment, the authors show how firms that follow these principles have outperformed the S&P 500 by 1000% over 10 years.

If you want to stick with a management structure to achieve those things, you can, though it’s probably not the most efficient use of your resources in the long term. I’m not suggesting you fire all your managers, it’s the ‘managing people’ part of the role that is largely redundant. In the case studies that Laloux cites, the organisations that have transformed to self managing structures retained all their managers but in roles that added more value.

Regardless of how to choose to evolve, evolve you must in order to thrive in today's world and in order to just to survive in the world of tomorrow.

​This article was originally published on LinkedIn.

​photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/45393120@N07/5997001123">HA0521-031</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">(license)</a>

While we want our people to take a holistic view, most people in organisations are not treated as ‘whole’. The very construct of the organisation is designed to strip them down to a narrow view, then we want them to be holistic in their day to day interactions. It’s not unique to our adult experience, it starts when we are young. We teach our kids to fit in, follow the rules, yet want them to think for themselves.

What utopia looks like is an organisation where those interacting with customers, or designing interactions, feel that they own a win-win outcome in that interaction and that they have enough skill and acumen to achieve it. That means that they understand the big picture, are privy to the information they need and empowered to achieve the outcome. Sure, there are skills involved in that, but it all hinges on trust.

Talking to a tenured executive this week about the problems his organisation faces in delivering a great customer experience, he cites the common scenario of major stakeholders getting complaints from customers about the lack of help they’ve had from the organisation.

He finds himself bringing together different people, who have looked at things from their constricted viewpoint, their limited span of control, and having to mediate a solution from a more holistic perspective. One that serves the customer and the organisation. Sound familiar?

While ‘the customer experience’ has become a rather trite phrase, it is the thing that makes or breaks perceptions of an organisation when people have to interact with it. It’s the proof point of any brand you want to create and a vital barometer of your leadership. Whether an organisation exists primarily to make money, or is not-for-profit, whether it lives and dies by serving the needs and desires of individuals or is custodian or gatekeeper of a greater good, is irrelevant. All organisations benefit from a good reputation.

Standing in the way will be the basic construct of your organisation, even ‘flat’ structures tend to have hierarchies with the power at the top. The power isn’t just about the level of financial authority and decision making, it’s about the level of input and access to information – important context that can make all the difference for the person dealing with a change that is intended to directly or indirectly help the customer, or simply in the day to day conversing with the customer and ‘doing their job’.
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The discussion in my recent article on how Profit, Purpose and Personal Fulfillment Can Thrive Together, focused on a new approach to organizational constructs. While this can only be driven by CEO’s and those they answer to, there is room in any construct for leaders to take an approach that allows their people to operate in a more holistic way, one that better serves them and the organisation.

The issue of trust is a starting point. To trust your people to deliver win-win outcomes, aside of the skills they will need to be equipped with, you have to trust them with information, you have to listen to their input, and they have to trust you.

When people trust you, they are willing to ask for help, willing to own mistakes. To gain that trust you have to firstly be willing to be vulnerable yourself, not infallible. Sure, you want to work with people who know what they’re doing, but to never make mistakes or to know everything?

For most of us showing any sign of weakness is out of our comfort zone. Our survival instinct, the part of our brain that switches to flight or fight when we are in mortal danger, has become the modus operandi for the way we live. Although most of us tend not to live in mortal danger for most of our lives, we are constantly using our minds in a way that mimics that instinct.

Notice as you talk to people that you are generally not listening to what they are saying. Yes you may be hearing the words that come out of their mouth, but you’re usually leveraging that to think about what to say next, rather than really understanding what is being said.

Here’s the reason, while you came into the world with an innate sense of what is right and wrong for you, from the minute you are born on this earth others think they know better. Slowly but surely you start to become less of who you were born to be and more of who others think you should be. This thing called ‘ego’ forms, your mind’s perception of you are. Almost immediately we start to fight or defend in some way, outwardly or silently.

Being vulnerable with the people you want to have trust in you is not a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. Leadership teams that can be vulnerable with each other can start to truly operate as a team and will be a lot more focused and successful as a result. But it is like wearing a very uncomfortable pair of shoes at first. As you get to know and accept your own fallibilities, so you will be able to listen to others and help them with theirs, freeing them to achieve the very things you want them to.

Trusting your people to do their job in a holistic way means treating them as whole people. Any step towards trust in your organisation, even one small step, will be one giant leap towards a better customer experience and better business outcomes.

​This article was originally published on LinkedIn.

photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/122099374@N07/16969244789">Dave Lewis</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/">(license)</a>

Get your developers and marketers taking customer calls; you’ll soon stop developing anything that requires your customers to endure to pain of calling you. Seriously.

Come on, hands up, how many of us live in fear and dread of having to call any company for help? Generally speaking, it’s a fairly hideous experience. You want someone to answer, quickly, who can actually help. You would think this is simple, but generally it’s not.

I came into the customer service industry through the back door, so to speak. Starting at the complaints end, I saw the rich, fertile ground for improvements. Simple improvements that often get overlooked.

One radical improvement in customer service though, in my opinion, is to get rid of your call centre. Call centres are an amazing hive of industry all of their own, likely devastating to your brand and bottom line (despite the often heroic efforts of those working in them).

We’ve made a science out of something that simply shouldn’t be.

Let’s step back. You are the provider of a product or service. You want your customers to buy what you offer, remain loyal and recommend you to others. So brand is important, feedback is important and continual improvement is important.

Here’s the thing. Call centres as a rule tend to remove the customer from your business and cost you a phenomenal amount of unnecessary money. In larger companies we’re often talking tens of millions of dollars each year in staffing alone. Then there’s the technology, any other capital investment and – most devastatingly – the damage to your brand.

Think about how they came to exist. Back office staff were getting too many calls distracting them from their ‘day job’. So call centers were born; a false economy.

My interest in customer experience transformation has often meant I’ve found myself in roles managing call centre contracts, or having one in my portfolio. In my last role, one of the most visionary people I’d worked with went for the big ‘call centre’ job, I was horrified. Worse, he wanted me to come and help him create a transformation.

Now don’t mistake my statements here for any derision towards customer service professionals, quite the opposite. The people who work and rise in the industry are extremely dedicated, insightful, resourceful and knowledgeable. But, frankly, they are often set up to fail.

For a call centre to give great service, it requires a number of things. Here’s what typically happens in organizations with a call centre ‘machine’:

A call comes in from a customer – why? Because the company has failed to provide something the customer needs. So the first thing is, how do we recognize this customer? Where we all fall down in our thinking is to assume companies are like Big Brother, they know everything about you when you call.

There are various forms of CRM (customer relationship management) systems that can – in theory – help companies to not only identify the customer but give a good indication as to why they are calling (begging the question, why not fix it before they call). I say, in theory, because most technology would work amazingly well if it was all the company had ever owned and all its basic operating systems were the most compatible and up to date. In reality, most companies now have so many legacy systems it takes an army of specialists to even map it all out.

So, if you happen to be a customer of a company and use several of its products or services, to think the company would know our whole profile is a given, but it’s often not the case.

Once you’ve got past they ‘who am I’ part, then there’s the ‘what am I calling about’ part. This is often sent with yet another silent prayer, or, depending on your experience of queuing and being identified, many expletives and a desperate hope that this actual person you are now talking to will be able to help you.

To do that requires a huge amount of training in the company's products and services. Now, what do you think is often the first thing to get canned when call volumes and/ or company expenditure is too high?  Good learning and development specialists, most managers, staff and customers all want employees to be excited about the brand that they work for, to be advocates outside of the workplace. In reality, very little investment gets made in this and any training becomes about how to press which buttons, with very little context about the bigger picture.

Then there’s the knowledge about the detailed inner workings of the product or services themselves. “Isn’t that what training is for?” people ask. Mm, training is useful but not to learn the contents of an encyclopedia, which is what it can be like trying to understand the in’s and out’s of some products or services.

This is where Knowledge Management Systems come in. A bit like CRM systems in term of their issues, with the added complexity of requiring constant upkeep and input. I’ve yet to see a fully ‘locked and loaded’ system, hence the  array of post it notes and signs adoring many call centre desks.

So once the inadequately trained person on the end of the phone manages to somehow find an answer to your plight, the next task is to track customer issues and make improvements to your product or service. Well, that’s what you’d think.

Even companies with fabulous tracking systems (again, the same system issues arise as for CRM systems and Knowledge Management systems), generally fail to take adequate action. The reporting system, if there is one, produces statistics.

Decision makers might look at the reports and say, oh, it’s only x% of revenue or our customer base, accepting certain degrees of failure in their product or service; though it can be a leap to say these things get connected to even this degree.

At best there will likely be a handful of improvement specialists that tend to then fail to have a real impact in terms of systematically reducing the call/failure demand based on a lack of overall understanding and commitment of the wider leadership.

It would make good sense to have a customer service representative involved all the way upstream, when you have a new concept and then start the design, or particularly when you are redesigning an existing product. This is a rarity, even if they are involved, it’s seldom with any kind of sign off - even when there’s a direct impact on call centre resources.

Then of course there’s the internal politics of call centers. The typical dynamic is a mutual loathing between customer service and the developers and marketers.

Imagine instead a customer service department that was looked upon as the ‘looking glass’ of success or failure of the company. Where those developing the upstream products and services regularly visited to hear first hand what customers had to say. Likewise, imagine customer service departments that live and breathe the brand and are active users and advocates of your products or services.

There are companies that have programmes to encourage or enforce this, but these are often short lived due to costs. When it does happen though, it opens up a whole new perspective and, for a short time, dialogue begins. A new found respect can be seen and the customer gets considered right upstream where they should always have been anyway.

So here is the point, why do you have a call centre? Take a long look at the costs here, direct and indirect. If you can look through all the points above and say, “we are doing those well”, then great, you are in the minority. If not, seriously, take a close look at this self destructive machine you’ve created and either set it up for success, or get rid of it and send those calls upstream. Dare you.
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This article was originally published in LinkedIn.

photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/10295270@N05/4500117446">R.I.P Dare</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">(license)</a>